Name: Fruit Puddings
Ingredients: ½ cup butter, for greasing; ½ cup all-purpose flour, for paste; 1 pint gooseberries; 3 ounces sugar

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fruit Puddings

Ingredients

½ cup butter, for greasing
½ cup all-purpose flour, for paste
1 pint gooseberries
3 ounces sugar

Directions

Prepare the basin

Grease a basin with butter.
Line the basin with a ½ inch thick paste using a rolling pin.

Fill and wrap

Place half of the gooseberries at the bottom of the basin.
Sprinkle half of the sugar over the gooseberries.
Add the remaining gooseberries.
Top with the rest of the sugar.
Draw the paste to the center.
Join the edges well.
Cover with a cloth.
Tie the cloth at the bottom.

Boil and serve

Boil in plenty of water for one hour.
Remove from the saucepan.
Untie the cloth.
Turn out onto a dish or leave in the basin.
Serve with sugar sprinkled on top.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour: Forms the paste that encloses the fruit and holds its shape while boiling.
Gooseberries: Provide the tart fruit filling that softens and releases juice during boiling.
Sugar: Sweetens the tart gooseberries and helps draw out their juice.
Butter: Greases the basin so the pudding releases cleanly when turned out.